Google offers personalised search results based on your search activity. So if you are trying to assess the performance of your SEO manager / agency and are frequently searching on the same set of keywords, Google will begin to alter your results based on what you click on as they attempt to serve you more relevant results. Google is attempting to serve you more relevant results but this doesn’t help when you are performing artificial searches to assess your search position – so, as a manager involved in new customer acquisition via online channels, you need to turn off personalised search to get the true picture of your search engine coverage.
Social Media is a low cost, trusted media source that makes a significant impact to the bottom line – it is an essential and integral part of any digital marketing strategy. The real benefits of using Social Media for business are:
- Customers will market your product / service for you – people want to be helpful if they can recommend a solution to a friend’s problem they will (provided your product offers a solution and you make it easy for them to make the recommendation)
- Customers trust recommendations from other customers – in some cases more than editorial content
- Customer recommendations such as Facebook “Likes” or “Fans” endorse a product / service by indicating it is worthwhile
- Social Media users are used to a stream of messages, invitations, promotions and other interactions – once you have captured their imagination enough for them to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ you, then they are pretty loyal which allows you to send an endless stream of relevant marketing messages
Search engine optimisation (SEO) should play an important part of any internet lead generation strategy, ranking well on page 1 of Google for a good phrase can bring you endless converting traffic and will usually be more cost effective over Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
Currently, the most important factor in SEO is building links to your website from other websites. These links are seen as ‘positive votes’ by the search engines and will help you rank for your keywords, but going out and buying 100 links for $30 apiece is not going to help you. It’s all about quality.
A key to successful new business development via online channels is to ensure you are not overly reliant on one source. We need to get coverage on search engines like Google but not at the expense of everything else. Always devote a significant proportion of your time and budget growing and developing sources that offer good quality traffic – this time will in turn have an impact on your search traffic through increased brand searches and numerous citations across the web.
Improving your position in the search results requires understanding how search engines work and developing a relevant strategy (that includes keyword research). Search engines strive to work on providing relevant search results – first time without the user needing to refine their search. As a marketeer my goal is to make a website that is highly relevant in its niche.
